This article seeks to map the Italian crime dramas broadcast in Spain. Then we move on to the twenty-first century to analyse the scope of Italian TV crime in contemporary Spanish TV. As case studies for our investigation, we use the circulation and reception in Spain of two Italian series: Il commissario Montalbano (El comisario Montalbano, Inspector Montalbano) (1999–2021) and Gomorra – La serie (Gomorra, Gomorrah) (2014–21). Using a political economy approach, we first examine the reception of the literary sources by Andrea Camilleri and Roberto Saviano. Second, we contextualize the significant shifts in the Spanish media landscape where those series were broadcast. Third, we determine why and how these TV series were useful and appealing to Spanish programmers. The research is complemented with audience data, an analysis of the series’ aesthetics and their critical reception.

The paper examines the changing portrayal of female leads in Italian crime television drama, focusing specifically on RAI productions from 2016 to 2021. While the number of women protagonists has grown considerably in recent years, gender representation remains uneven and often characterised by ambivalence and contradiction – particularly in portrayals of female professionalism. Using content and character analysis, the study is divided into two parts. The first traces the historical marginalisation of women in Italian crime serials, where male protagonists traditionally held dominance in both narrative and professional authority. The second explores how contemporary series depict gender through postfeminist perspectives, balancing between innovative representations and lingering stereotypes. It contends that, although significant progress has been made in diversifying female characters – especially through more complex narrative roles and professional identities – such progress is frequently limited by romantic subplots and traditional gender norms. The article places these findings within wider discussions on narrative complexity, production culture and the symbolic role of public service broadcasting in shaping gender discourse.

At the beginning of the 1970s, the landscape of Italian television dramas intersects with transforming trends, allowing the crime genre to emerge as a fertile ground for experimentation. Detective stories draw upon 1970s counterculture and open up a cryptic universe no longer knowable by reason alone. Thus, a new narrative movement begins that lasts the entire decade, inspired by the subjects of the fantastic with supernatural mysteries dominated by the occult. These productions deconstruct the pedagogical mission of early television and find new trajectories for television drama. The most groundbreaking works of this period are often forgotten or confined to the category of minor productions: ESP and Extra. First framing the period historically, and then turning to a textual and culturological analysis of the two titles, this article attempts to shed light on the fracture created by the two sceneggiati in Italian TV. It explores the way these works recounted 1970s society and prefigured that of today.

Foregrounding the thinking and reflective process so candidly on screen, the essay film form still involves a (hidden) process of conceiving and making. However, to this time, very little research has been done on the thinking process involved in essay filmmaking. Thus, this volume is a collective discussion on what we call the screen writing process in essay filmmaking. Essayistic non-fiction scripts and the documentation of production and editing procedures rarely make it into the archives. As editors, we both feel the importance of exploring this process of screen writing for essay film, which is beyond a conventional understanding of ‘screen-writing’, i.e. scriptwriting prior to the making of a film, as essay filmmaking usually involves a spontaneous process of writing, re-writing with images and sound on the timeline. Decades of reflection on Alexandre Astruc's idea that the camera and lens are the equivalent of the writer's pen (1948, 1968) have not produced an equivalent of analysis of the craft. Different in definition, and somehow more to the point for this volume, Agnes Varda's cinecriture (ciné-writing) (1986) added to the debate and indicated that the essay film needs more process-oriented attempts for the identification of the filmmaker's act of scriptural activity via images and sound. Thus, in this edited collection, we ask: how does an essay film come into being? What are the methods involved in the making of an essay film? What is the screening-writing process during the essay filmmaking? And how do filmmakers make creative and intellectual decisions? We invite artist-filmmakers and practitioner-theorists to reflect on these questions. The provisional idea of the collection, born out of the discussions held during the Symposium at the University of York and The Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies (2017), Essay Film and Narrative Techniques: First Symposium of the BAFTSS Essay Film Research Group, organized by Romana Turina and Richard Walsh, 18–19 November 2017 in the Bowland Auditorium, addressed a need for further discussion on the essay film form.

To progress in the financing, developing, and organising a film production, a producer has to make applications and send letters to various places. To be convincing, there must be the script for the film. What to do, when the director doesn't want to write a script, even though he is a talented and skillful writer, a writer of dozens of books? What is behind that reluctance to write a script for an essay film?

In this chapter the author examines these questions by focusing on two cases by the well-known Finnish filmmaker and writer Peter von Bagh. As his producer, he was able to observe von Bagh's work process and working methods from the ideas to the distribution of finalised films. On a more general level, the author looks at the whole process of making essay films and the role of the script in it.

Despite its inclusion in the earliest essay films, animation was subsequently dropped in favour of the recording of personal testimony, eyewitness events and the use of archive footage. The result is, even today, a sparse number of animated essay films.

We compare examples of the more common montage based essay films with animated works, with a particular emphasis on how they materially instantiate different models of thinking - dialectical, disjunctive, computational. We compare visual logics such as montage and transformation, new relationships between media facilitated using rotoscoping and the recent use of AI. We argue that it is its broad range of artistic techniques and connections to other disciplines that now make animated media best placed to indicate the future of thinking as an audio-visual practice. In return, animation will have to confront issues of its own status as an artform, a form of media practice and as a science.

The collection explores various methods of screen-writing for essay film, through a diverse set of reflections and analyses of canonical and unconventional approaches of essay filmmaking. It includes contributions from filmmakers and practice-led researchers, who reflect on their production process in the form of production diaries or self-critique, and analyses from scholars who investigate the production contexts of essay film, as well as interviews with filmmakers on how their practices are conceptualised and contextualised. Overall, it takes essay film as an expression of personal camera, collaborative/collective work, and experimental work where the boundaries between different art forms blurs and merges.

US filmmaker Rose Troche has had a lengthy career as a writer and director working across film and television contexts since gaining prominence with the low-budget feature Go Fish in 1994. In more recent times, she has created several virtual reality experiences that have explored social issues such as date rape and police brutality. This chapter explores the interactive VR work We Live Here, which was produced as part of Meta’s ‘VR for Good’ programme. Created using a game engine, We Live Here is a documentary experience that takes the user into the precarious world of Rockey, a 59-year-old woman who experiences homelessness in Los Angeles, California. The VR experience begins when police ‘sweep’ a park where Rockey has pitched a tent, causing her to flee. The user is then left to enter the tent and explore her belongings, all of which activate narrative threads that reveal aspects of Rockey’s full life story.

The chapter explores the writing and creation of We Live Here, which involved collaboration with awareness-raising non-profit organization Invisible People, Los Angeles Housing and hands on research and consultation with homeless and formerly homeless people in the local community. It argues that the finished work fosters an embodied user experience of homelessness, highlighting just how easily one might find themselves in the situation of precarious living. As such, it is an impactful work that presents an innovative portrayal of its subject matter.

The 2019 South Korean film, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, written by female screenwriter Young-Ah Yoo, created controversy when released by depicting the entrenched gender discrimination that Korean women face from childhood to adulthood. The storm surrounding the film was unsurprising. Yoo adapted the story from a notorious novel of the same name, which had brought feminist issues to the fore in a nation where women traditionally have faced scorn and mockery for addressing themes of gender inequality, an issue stemming from engrained patriarchal ideologies that support defined gender roles. Additionally, the film adaptation was released in the wake of Korea’s #MeToo movement, a highly volatile time that deepened tensions between feminists and traditionalists. Predictably, the film sparked strong anti-feminist sentiment, and Yoo’s adaptation could not avoid entering the debate as a contemporary response to the #MeToo movement. This chapter approaches Yoo’s adaptation of Kim Jiyoung: Born 1982 in respect of adaptation theory, focusing on her strategies to rearticulate the divisive feminist novel for a production destined for controversy. The analysis brings a screenwriter’s perspective to examine how the adaptation negotiates its commercial imperatives with the novel’s critical feminist tones while maintaining the intention to provoke public debate on gender inequality. Finally, the chapter explores the adaptation’s consequences following release and its impact on society.